Best First Hours

fps

This is my third first hour in the Fallout series, played the original Fallout back in 2008, then Fallout 3 in 2009. Both games left me interested, but wary. I never went on with Fallout, but played the third game for about 10 hours before I became frustrated with what I thought to be iffy sneaking and overwhelming combat. I definitely feel like I gave the game a great attempt, but in the end just didn’t have the heart to go on.

Fast-forward to 2011, and my brother-in-law gives me Fallout: New Vegas out of the blue. He says it is one of his favorite games, and like how some people give away their favorite book to friends, he apparently just gives away video games. I would have preferred something, anything else, but what can you do? Plus, Paul loves it.

So here we are with October 2010’s New Vegas, the Vice City-esque sequel to Fallout 3. New setting, new characters, slightly tweaked gameplay, and from everything I’ve read, absolutely chock full of bugs. But hey, I really enjoyed Fallout 3’s first hour, so I’m hoping for a repeat with New Vegas. And you never know, I may go all the way with this one.

As a prequel to the original Deus Ex, which I've replayed numerous times—well, mostly that beginning level set on Liberty Island—Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a difficult task ahead of itself. It has to be more visually advanced than the 2000 offering, with updated gameplay mechanics, and yet keep things less technological in terms of story, as this is a time before JC Denton took on the Illuminati with his wild and crazy nano-augments, when augments were glorified.

Deus Ex is one of the earlier examples of fusing RPG elements with shooters, often allowing players to not even fire a gun so long as they upgrade their character correctly. Nowadays, with titles like Fallout: New Vegas and just about every shooter with a name implementing some kind of RPG leveling system, it's hard to say how tall Deus Ex: Human Revolution will stand.

As the sequel to my 2007 Game of the Year, I had high expectations of Portal 2, and so did the developers Valve, and everyone else mildly interested in video games. This was a milestone release, and Valve has been rewarded with many accolades and undoubtedly excellent sales numbers. I was able to sit down with Portal 2 for Windows and beat it in three extended gaming sessions over a few weeks.

That last sentence might be rather revealing, yes, the game took me weeks to beat. I took on the original Portal in one sitting. Of course, Portal 2 is longer than the original, and I have two kids now instead of none, but I’ll say right off the bat I felt like some kind of spark was missing.

So let’s just dive right into my review of Portal 2. This review will probably be shorter than usual simply because of my personal pact to spend less time writing full reviews this year, so hopefully I can more succinctly say what needs to be said.

PC game development is hard. Unlike consoles and their mass-manufactured conformity, every
PC has a different set of guts, so there comes a time when the
development team needs to test their code through dozens of Frankenstein
computer setups to make sure the game actually works on an acceptable
percentage of PCs on the market.

Crytek had a fairly genius solution to this annoyance: they made a game
that no computer assembled in the present day would be powerful enough
to process, and figured that the future would solve their problems for
them. It was called Crysis; Crytek's prophecy was fulfilled when NASA
aborted the space program in order to refocus its priorities towards
creating a machine capable of playing this game [citation needed].

For whatever reason, Crytek abandoned this strategy with the game's
sequel. Crysis 2 was created to be played not only on PCs assembled on
Earth and before the year 2018, but on current consoles as well. I
played a bit of Crysis 2 and got a sense of what the distant future will
be like when consumer machinery finally catches up to the original
Crysis' requirements.

I recorded the first hour of the game in glorious 480p and trimmed the
downscaled footage to give you a taste of the game's opening sixty. A
busted monument, superpower lessons, robot spiders, and choke-slams await.

It has been a pretty good year of gaming for me in 2011, with Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and Radiant Historia sending out the original Nintendo DS in proper fashion, but even more exciting is one of the biggest games of the year, Portal 2.

It’s fun to look back at where the Portal “series” began: as a humble bonus in The Orange Box which featured big names like Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. Portal was essentially created by a couple of DigiPen grads and Valve molded that into one of the biggest gaming surprises... ever. It was my 2007 Game of the Year and I wasn’t the only one to hand it such an award.

Portal 2 was released last month, but instead of riding the coattails of something like Half-Life 2: Episode 3, it comes out as a full, stand-alone game. It probably doesn’t need to be said that it is receiving beyond excellent reviews, but before we venture too deep down the portal hole, let’s visit its first hour.

A few days ago, it dawned on me that I've been contributing to The First
Hour for a year now. A whole year, no fake! Just remembering last week
can be a trying experience for me, so thinking back twelve months is
like trying to visualize the guts of a black hole.

To assist my trip down memory lane, I decided to play a bit of Red Steel
2, the first game I reviewed. I gave it a pretty glowing writeup at the
time, and it ended up as the runner-up for my Game of the Year 2010
across all systems. The game isn't without its foibles, but it delivered
the hardcore shooty-swordy experience that the target render for the original game fooled many into believing possible at the Wii's launch in
2006. That was enough for me to excuse most of its shortcomings.

To commemorate this one-year anniversary, I decided to capture a bit of
video from Red Steel 2 to share. Originally, I planned on making a
montage of the dozens of cool abilities, finishing moves, and cinematics
that made the experience so fun for me, but then I stumbled across one
six-minute mission around the game's midpoint that makes for a good standalone exhibition. It also cut way down on the video editing
workload for me, which was admittedly the primary factor for the change
of plans. Still, I think it turned out just fine.

In my December blitz of full reviews, this is my last one of the year. I'm not going to say I saved the best for last, because that falls to either Super Mario Galaxy 2 or Mass Effect 2 at this point, but Borderlands is certainly way up there. Like Mirror's Edge, Borderlands paves its own genre and does it beautifully. The mash-up of first person shooter and RPG with a zillion guns tacked on for extra destruction gels perfectly. The classes feel distinctly different, four player online co-op just works super well, and the game features over 30 hours of content on just your first playthrough (and you will play more than once).

Borderlands was released in October of 2009, so it's been out a while and is very cheap if you want to get into it now. The team is currently developing Duke Nukem Forever so there's no fear of Borderlands 2 coming out for at least a year and a half, I would think. I plan to continue writing about Borderlands well into next year as I still have three sets of downloadable content to review after just covering the first one, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. But as the end of the year is imminent, I really feel like I need to get my thoughts on the main game out on the table.

Mike has gone into great detail already on what makes Borderlands so great, and after re-reading his review, I honestly don't have a lot to add. This is one of my favorite games of the year and I'll detail why I personally liked it so much below, but if you're looking for an in depth review I would recommend you check out Mike's.

When I think back to the first time I saw Sonic the Hedgehog running on
the Genesis (which I wasn't yet familiar with), I recall marveling at
how much better it looked than the Mario games I had at home. I remember
the time my brother tried to explain Super Mario 64 to me, and how
little I understood what he was saying until I finally witnessed it in
action. When I brought home a Gamecube the morning it launched, I was
impressed with the speed and fluidity of the Death Star trench run that
began Rogue Leader, at least when compared to its predecessor on the
N64. But the first time I saw Call of Duty 2 at Toys R Us on an HDTV
screen, the only thought that ran through my mind was...

"Really? This is next-gen?"

Yes,
the characters were constructed of more polygons. And the textures were
clearer. And of course, the higher resolution made everything easier to
see. But I just couldn't help but feel a little disappointed, seeing
that the the game, and others in the 360 launch library, just didn't
seem to bring any worthwhile improvements to the table. In fact, it
wasn't until the first time I saw Lost Planet's smoking RPG trails,
gorgeous boss monsters, and swarms of flying enemies that the feeling of
a new generation really sank in.

On the other hand, many
quality games are released at the end of a console's life cycle, once
developers have a firmer grasp on the intricacies of the hardware. It is
unfortunate that they're often overlooked for the next console's rushed
launch titles, but that's reality. EA's Criterion studio, creators of
the high-octane Burnout series, attempted to buck that trend with Black,
a first-person shooter
for the PS2 and Xbox that was marketed as a next-gen shooter for
current-gen platforms.

The game certainly looked
impressive the first time I saw a friend playing it, some five years
ago. Does it still pack a punch, or will Black forever be lost between
generations?

If you pay attention to the development timeline, there are some clues
you can pick out that may hint at a flawed final product. If the game changes platforms mid-way through development, that should send up a warning signal. If it does so more than once, that's probably an impending disappointment. If some lead developer leaves the team shortly before it's finished, that's another. And the developing company goes under before the game hits the shelves, that's something worth considering as well.

But
the easiest way to spot a troubled game is by the dearth of information
preceding its release. Goldeneye 007 for the Wii was heralded as the
second coming of the N64 classic at this year's E3. On the other hand,
its Nintendo DS counterpart was quietly announced alongside it at E3 and
unceremoniously released on the same day last week. I made an
extra effort to look for details of and screenshots from the Nintendo DS game,
but had a very tough time finding anything of substance.

Curious,
but with low expectations, I rented the spy-sized DS game card from
GameFly. I mean, it's still Goldeneye, right? And the Wii version seems
to have plenty of polish, so why shouldn't its DS counterpart? I've
spent thirty minutes with the game. Is it an undercover success or a dirty little secret?

When I think of GoldenEye 007,
I think of a screen split in two by a horizontal line through the
center. I think of the Complex, a multiplayer map with plenty of hidden
nooks and crannies, as well as one raised bunker room overlooking the
map's main area. I think of the claustrophobic staircase that leads into
that room. And I think of the countless times I climbed that staircase,
RCP-90 at the ready, only to catch a glimpse of an enormous explosion
before blood dripped down my half of the screen.

When I think of
GoldenEye 007, I think of my brother hoarding the explosives, camping in
that fortress of perfectly-placed remote mines, watching my screen
until the perfect moment to strike, then pumping his fist and laughing
when the blood started to spill. Every. Single. Time.

It was
infuriating then, but I can't help but laugh looking back on those days.
It seems Activision, the current owners of the 007 videogame license,
want to cash in on our fond memories of the N64 phenomenon that
introduced so many to the first-person shooter genre. The
game-publishing juggernaut announced a Wii re-imagining of GoldenEye 007
at this year's E3 with plenty of hype in tow. Though it stars Daniel
Craig and boasts a storyline more fit for modern times, the new
GoldenEye appears to be taking many cues from the Pierce Brosnan-era
video game, with updates to the gameplay that seem stripped right out of
the latest Call of Duty titles.

There
aren't a lot of games that can get people excited through name alone,
but GoldenEye 007 definitely fits that bill. It's easy to forget,
however, that the GoldenEye name has been mishandled
before. I've briefly stepped into the gadget-laden shoes of this latest
James Bond. How did this first mission go? This briefing is for your
eyes only, 007.